Joe.

When I was in OAC I stumbled into a completely unforgetable person named Emily Ramanowskioiansdga;oinags, or something like that.
She was the type of person who's body matched her personality: Pink hair, multiple piercings, Value Village adorned and bubbly. It was mildly sickening to be around her sometimes, if not because of her overwhelming fashion, then for her overwhelming personality.

I haven't seen or heard from Emily in ages. The last I heard of her, she had been kicked out of her parents house and was working as a piercer somewhere in St. Catharines. Fun times.

One night when Emily was at my house, some guy called looking for her. I tried not to get into Emily's business often, as most of her business involved random sexing of random men and massive amounts of drugs of which I did not dabble in.

I handed her the phone.

Ten minutes later a car showed up and Emily left. Whatever.

I can't remember if Joe first confronted me on IRC, or if he actually called again. I can't remember what we talked about, but I remember it being innocent and I remember liking him a lot and I remember him telling me that I had a, "hot voice." He said he, "had to call again, to find the girl with the hot voice."
We talked for ages the week before I went to Winnipeg. He told me all about his father and I'm sure I told him about the semi-traumatic occurence of the time that I thought was a life-ending catastrophe. We mixed well and the week that I was in Winnipeg, I missed him greatly.
We still talked for months. Emily warned me that he was, "grossly overweight," but I didn't seem to care. It was never his weight that bothered me, it was the drugs that bothered me.

Joe was a huge burnout.

He talked like a burnout, he acted like a burnout and he smoked enough pot in one day, to put me out of commission for a year. We had drastically different agendas and for that, Joe and I never clicked.

We met at the Welland fair sometime in early October, 2000. I was wearing neon orange, raver, fun fur pants that were seven times too big for me and he was surrounded by a group of his buddies that seemed to protect him from me, the goodie-too-shoes. It was all too backwards.
He never spoke to me that night and after that, our conversations sorta faded to once a week and then to once a month and so on, and so on.We still talked on and off for as long as I can remember. We never hungout, never met though. Just talked for hours on random days, establishing a relationship that lasted for years in the shadows of IRC and phone lines.

It wasn't until September, the following year that we both realised that we were going to be attending the same Graphic Design program at Niagara College.

He talked to me for a minute, and then ran away.

He was too shy, but he said he didn't mind looking at my cleavage.

He dropped out of the program a month in.

After that, I only talked to Joe a handful of times. I remember asking him to come to Ridgeway to hangout one night and he finally agreed, but neither of us followed up. A couple months after that, my sister told me he died in a car accident.

I miss Joe and most times I wonder how I could miss something that was never physically there to begin with. I can't mourn his body, but I miss his presence. I miss it a lot. Sometimes I cry because I can still hear his voice in my head. Sometimes it's hard to realise that I can't pick up the phone to call him.

There are certain things that will always remind me of him. The colour orange. Muddy carnivals. Midnight phone coversations. Pot. Neden. Photoshop and IRC.

I wish I would have been strong enough to avoid our stereotypes of eachother and be his friend in the flesh. I wish I could have been tangible to him and vice versa. I wish I could have gone to his funeral, I wish I would have known about his funeral. I wish I had the guts to stand up to his friends, I wish I would have given him more time.

I've had so much death this year. I'm so utterly sick of it.